Dr. Chris Simpson, the new head of the Canadian Medical Association, is right to demand a comprehensive, nation-wide senior care strategy.

Dr. Chris Simpson, the new head of the Canadian Medical Association, is right to push for a senior care strategy.

Published on Sun Aug 24 2014

National leadership is lacking on the most compelling challenge facing Canadian medicare: proper care of our seniors. It affects us all. Without a comprehensive, nationwide plan to address this growing population Canada’s struggling health care system risks slipping ever further in world rankings.

It’s for good reason that Canadians today “are increasingly worried about the quality, safety and timeliness of care.”

That unsparing diagnosis comes from Dr. Chris Simpson, the Canadian Medical Association’s new president. But he also provides the correct prescription: “If we can fix seniors’ care, we will go a long way to fixing our health care system.”

Needed is a national senior care strategy, one that will guide investment across Canada in key areas such as home care, long-term care, support for family members helping aging relatives, affordable housing and poverty reduction.

It can’t happen without federal leadership — precisely what’s missing under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Rather than assuming an oversight role and leading transformative change, his government has largely downplayed health care, treating it as a purely provincial matter.

That approach is unacceptable, Simpson said in his inaugural speech to the medical association this past week. “The building and maintenance of a healthy Canada is the responsibility of every level of government — and federal leadership has never been needed more.”

Simpson presented a concise and insightful analysis of how Canada’s health care system has fallen out of step with the makeup of its population. In the 1960s, when medicare was designed, the average Canadian was 27 years old and the system was engineered to deliver acute care through hospitals.

Now the average Canadian is 20 years older and, in addition to hospitals, there is dire need for facilities to help aging patients with chronic problems. “Unfortunately, our health care system has not changed to meet the needs presented by this new reality,” Simpson said. The result is that about 15 per cent of acute-care hospital beds are occupied by seniors waiting to go elsewhere, putting immense strain on the system as a whole.

Simpson estimated that “warehousing” seniors in hospital beds is needlessly costing $2.3 billion a year; it’s clogging emergency departments; and it’s slowing the delivery of medical procedures. “It seems crazy, doesn’t it? No one would ever design a health system like this.”

It’s on track to get even worse. About 15 per cent of Canadians are now 65 and older and this population will double over the next 20 years, with the extremely high-need 85-and-older group set to quadruple. Simpson, a Kingston cardiologist, called this a looming “silver tsunami.”

Finally, there’s also a shortage of first-rate care for those at the very end of life. Only about 16 per cent of Canadians dying this year will have access to quality palliative care, Simpson said. “How well you die,” he added, “depends on your postal code.”

Reforming senior care is the key to repairing medicare across this country. This is a key part of what constitutes nation-building in the 21st century. And it can’t happen without bold and determined leadership from Ottawa.

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